The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule and narrative assessment: Evidence for specific narrative impairments in autism spectrum disorders

Banney, Rebecca M; Harper-Hill, Keely; Arnott, Wendy L.

doi:10.3109/17549507.2014.977348

Cited by 47 publications

(76 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Compared to TD groups that are well‐matched for chronological age, nonverbal IQ and formal language (syntax or vocabulary), ASD groups usually underperform in the production of appropriately informative referring expressions during narrative tasks [Colle, Baron‐Cohen, Wheelwright, & van Der Lely, ; Suh et al, ; Banney, Harper‐Hill, & Arnott, ; Arnold, Bennetto, & Diehl, ]. The same has been found in production studies that have used interactive experimental manipulations of the participant and interlocutor's shared visual perspective [Nadig, Vivanti, & Ozonoff, ; Fukumura, ; Dahlgren & Dahlgren Sandberg, ; Volden, Mulcahy, & Holdgrafer, ; Nadig, Seth, & Sasson, ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 83%

When do Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Take Common Ground into Account During Communication?

et al. 2018

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One feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a deficit in verbal reference production, that is, providing an appropriate amount of verbal information for the listener to refer to things, people, and events. However, very few studies have manipulated whether individuals with ASD can take a speaker's perspective to interpret verbal reference. A critical limitation of all interpretation studies is that comprehension of another's verbal reference required the participant to represent only the other's visual perspective. Yet, many everyday interpretations of verbal reference require knowledge of social perspective (i.e., a consideration of which experiences one has shared with which interlocutor). We investigated whether 22 5;0-7;11-year-old children with ASD and 22 well-matched typically developing (TD) children used social perspective to comprehend (Study 1) and produce (Study 2) verbal reference. Social perspective-taking was manipulated by having children collaboratively complete activities with one of two interlocutors such that for a given activity, one interlocutor was Knowledgeable and one was Naïve. Study 1 found no between-group differences for the interpretation of ambiguous references based on social perspective. In Study 2, when producing referring terms, the ASD group made modifications based on listener needs, but this effect was significantly stronger in the TD group. Overall, the findings suggest that high-functioning children with ASD know with which interlocutor they have previously shared a given experience and can take this information into account to steer verbal reference. Nonetheless, they show clear performance limitations in this regard relative to well-matched controls. Autism Res 2018, 11: 1366-1375. © 2018 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: No one had studied if young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) could take into account previous collaboration with particular conversation partners to drive how well they communicate with others. In both their language understanding and spoken language, we found that five to 7-year-olds with ASD were able to consider what they had previously shared with the conversation partner. However, they were impaired when compared to typically developing children in the degree to which they tailored their spoken language for a specific listener.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 83%

When do Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Take Common Ground into Account During Communication?

et al. 2018

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“…For instance, Colle et al () found that during narrative production, individuals with ASD used fewer personal pronouns and referential expressions, which require ToM abilities. Other studies reporting greater production of ambiguous pronouns in individuals with ASD compared to NT individuals (Baixauli et al, ; Banney et al, ; Norbury & Bishop, ; Novogrodsky, ; Suh et al, ) also suggest that some difficulties in narrative production may be related more to ToM abilities than to general linguistic skills.…”

Section: Additional Limitations Of the Visual Ease Assumptionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Studies using visual narratives as prompts in narrative elicitation tasks have overwhelmingly found impaired narrative production in both children and adults with ASD compared to NT individuals (see meta‐analysis in Baixauli, Colomer, Roselló, & Miranda, ). Such deficits include reduced syntactic complexity (Banney, Harper‐Hill, & Arnott, ; Capps, Losh, & Thurber, ; Norbury & Bishop, ); fewer pronominal references (Colle, Baron‐Cohen, Wheelwright, & Van der Lely, ; Rumpf, Kamp‐Becker, Becker, & Kauschke, ); greater use of ambiguous pronouns or references (Banney et al, ; Norbury & Bishop, ; Novogrodsky, ; Suh et al, ); fewer narrative elements (Banney et al, ); reduced references to internal or cognitive states (Baron‐Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, ; Capps et al, ; Rumpf et al, ); impairments in making inferences and understanding causal relationships between events (Losh & Capps, ); and, overall, stories that are less coherent and diminished in semantic quality (Diehl, Bennetto, & Young, ; Losh & Gordon, ; Rollins, ; Tager‐Flusberg, ). In contrast to these studies, Tager‐Flusberg and Sullivan () found no differences in narrative production abilities in participants with ASD compared to NT controls who were matched on linguistic ability.…”

Section: Tests Of the Visual Ease Assumptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dismantling the “Visual Ease Assumption:" A Review of Visual Narrative Processing in Clinical Populations

Coderre

2019

Topics in Cognitive Science

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Visual narratives, such as wordless picture books and picture sequences like comics, have a long history in clinical testing, research, and intervention settings. The widespread “Visual Ease Assumption” rests on the premise that visual narratives, given their non‐linguistic nature, may alleviate processing difficulties in populations that struggle with language. In this paper, I review the evidence for and against this Visual Ease Assumption in three clinical populations in which language deficits are common or diagnostic: autism spectrum disorder (ASD), specific language impairment (SLI; now known as Developmental Language Disorder, DLD), and aphasia. I first redefine the Visual Ease Assumption as two testable predictions: (a) that visual narrative processing should be unimpaired for clinical populations compared to neurotypical (NT) populations; and (b) that in clinical populations, visual narrative processing should be less impaired than linguistic narrative processing. Through a review of the limited evidence available to test these predictions in ASD, SLI, and aphasia, I show that the Visual Ease Assumption is largely unsupported in empirical studies. Furthermore, I outline three additional limitations of the Visual Ease Assumption regarding the complexity of narrative processing, visual narrative tasks, and cognitive deficits in different clinical populations. Therefore, visual narratives should not be assumed to be “easier” for clinical populations that struggle with language; instead, a more thorough consideration of the cognitive processes involved in visual narrative processing is needed.

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“…Even in high-functioning autism (HFA), where there has been no language delay or where language has reached normal levels by school age, language can remain affected when measured at the level of discourse, pragmatics, and higher-order semantics. Thus children with HFA without any language impairment as measured by standardized tests can show such impairment in a story generation task (Norbury et al 2014;Banney et al 2015). Even in people with a diagnosis of Asperger's, language can be abnormal behaviorally in prosody, volume, pragmatics, rate, and comprehension (Noterdaeme et al 2010) and be processed differently in the brain (Radulescu et al 2013;Moseley et al 2016).…”

Section: What Studies Of Language In Asd To Date Revealmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In no subgroup on the autism spectrum was performance on 'that' worse than on 'the', as a pragmatic account would have predicted. Difficulties with anaphoric definite noun phrases and pronouns have been highlighted in several studies of narrative in ASD (Baltaxe and D'Angiola 1996;Banney et al 2015;Norbury, Gemmell and Paul 2013).…”

Section: What Studies Of Language In Asd To Date Revealmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reference Across Pathologies: A New Linguistic Lens on Disorders of Thought

Hinzen

2017

Theoretical Linguistics

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According to a linguistic tradition here termed ‘Cartesian’, language is relegated to an expressive system considered to provide the means to encode or communicate an independently constituted thought process. An alternative vision here termed ‘un-Cartesian’ regards language as an organizational principle of human-specific thought, with the implication that thought of the same type would not become available to a cognitive system without language and that clinical thought disturbances implicate language dysfunction. I here explore the latter view in the context of intra-species variation of the human cognitive type: cognitive disorders that, as in the case of autism and schizophrenia, come with language-related clinical symptoms. If language is the configurator of human-specific thought, cognitive and linguistic phenotypes should illuminate one another. I specifically review evidence for impairment in one universal linguistic function, namely reference. Linguistic meaning is referential meaning: we cannot utter sentences without referring to persons, objects, and events, based on lexicalized concepts that provide descriptions of these referents. Reference in this sense takes a number of human-specific forms, from generic to specific, deictic and personal ones, which empirically co-vary with forms of grammatical organization. As reference in some of these forms proves to be highly vulnerable across major mental disorders, grammar is thereby linked to forms of thought and selfhood critical to normal cognitive functioning. In this way clinical linguistic and cognitive diversity provides an important new window into the foundational question of the thought-language relationship and the cognitive significance of grammar.

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The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule and narrative assessment: Evidence for specific narrative impairments in autism spectrum disorders

Abstract: The present findings provide evidence that children with ASD exhibit subtle story generation impairments and provide preliminary support for the inclusion of narratives elicited as part of the ADOS in the assessment of specific language skills in this population.

Cited by 47 publications

References 33 publications

When do Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Take Common Ground into Account During Communication?

When do Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder Take Common Ground into Account During Communication?

Dismantling the “Visual Ease Assumption:" A Review of Visual Narrative Processing in Clinical Populations

Reference Across Pathologies: A New Linguistic Lens on Disorders of Thought

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